Why can’t news programmes cover past and present rather than future?

Yesterday, from the vantage-point of an Irish historian, I gave six radio interviews (Radio Five Live, BBC Merseyside and twice BBC Wales and the World Service) on the Magdalene Laundries, which were effectively workhouses for poor, friendless Irishwomen from the eighteenth century until the 1990s, when the last one closed. Four interviews happened before the report was released, the others shortly after its publication, but before I had time to do more than scan a summary of its main conclusions.

My job was to give some history and context for the existence of grim institutions where women and children laboured miserably, though I was also asked to assess the level of involvement of the Irish state (what the inquiry was set up to establish) and to predict whether there would be a government apology and compensation for survivors.

The report would establish that despite earlier denials, since independence in 1922 the state had referred or facilitated the referral of more than a quarter of the 10,000 or so consigned to that sad life for months, years and sometimes for life. But many girls ended up in laundries because they were orphans, were rejected by their families, were alleged to be in moral danger or were facing starvation.

I'm happier – because on surer ground – discussing the past and present than predicting the future, but I made the most sensible guesses I could and mostly focused on a cruel period in Irish life when the vulnerable were ignored or ill-treated by most of society and those regarded as an embarrassment were shoved into church-run institutions or encouraged to emigrate.

In all the years since child abuse in Ireland became a public scandal, blaming the Roman Catholic Church has been the default position since it ran so many hospitals, schools and institutions. Yet many priests, brothers and nuns had been press-ganged as teenagers and while a substantial number were emotional cripples, exploiters or abusers, many more worked desperately hard and tried to do the best by their charges and quite a few did a much better job than some nurses or social workers do today.

Now this exemplary report has been issued and we could have informed discussion, the British media seem to have lost interest in laundries. There was nothing about them this morning on news programmes that had been fascinated by them yesterday. Instead, what was preoccupying interviewers was what was likely to be in the – as yet unpublished – report on the Mid Staffordshire Trust and what should be its consequences. But there was time over to speculate on how MEPs would vote on reforms to the common fisheries policy.

Does Joe Public really want guesses rather than facts, or is it simply that the media are easily bored?